Robert and Darlene Culberth, photo courtesy Families of Victims of Homicide and Missing Persons

Robert “Curly” Culberth was an Army veteran who served overseas during World War II.

After serving his country Curly and his 51-year-old wife Darlene dedicated much of their lives to serving the needs of the Veterans of Foreign Wars club.

Curly, 70, had served in regional and national positions and he and his wife had often volunteered at VFW clubs wherever they lived. When they lived in Chaffee County, they had volunteered at the Buena Vista VFW.

After working as a mechanic most of his adult life in the mountains, Curly retired in 1989 and the couple moved back to the Eastern Plains where they both grew up.

On Aug. 1, 1991, the couple was where they often had been, at the Lamar VFW club.

They had volunteered to work there like countless other times.

This time it was because the manager resigned about a month earlier. The Culberths were filling in until a new manager was assigned.

Robert Leyba, 63, photo courtesy of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation

Robert Lee Leyba had two stab wounds in the chest as he lay bleeding in an alley beside a Commerce City trailer park.

The man who attacked Leyba in the back of a Recreational Vehicle at Los Valientes trailer park fled on foot.

A second man dragged Leyba to the front of the RV and left him briefly in the passenger seat. He later opened the passenger door and Leyba flopped to the ground. The second man grabbed Leyba, dragged him across a parking lot and dumped him near a tree.

When police arrived, Leyba was still conscious and breathing. The officer asked him who stabbed him.

“Herman.”

The stabbing happened on Sept. 8, 2007.

Nearly eight years later, Leyba’s niece, Tina Terry, of Colorado Springs still holds out hope that Commerce City police will solve the case. She said Friday that she has repeatedly spoken to Commerce City detectives, who tell her that the case is closed by exception.

What that means is that police are confident they know who killed her uncle, an Army veteran who fell on hard times shortly before his death, but circumstances make it impossible to solve the case.

Terry, a leader in a group called Families of Victims of Homicide and Missing Persons, is still hopeful that the man who killed her uncle more than seven years ago will some day be brought to justice.

A man who went by the street name “Wolf” had often been seen near Interstate 25 and Speer Boulevard.

It’s a prime location for “flying” cardboard with scrawled solicitations including pleas for food or bus ticket money, the humble “anything helps” approach, or the straight-forward acknowledgement that any contribution will be used to buy booze.

At the location, the homeless can catch the attention of streams of commuters headed to work in downtown Denver or to college at the Auraria campus.

Wolf, whose given name is Michael, had a companion to help him win over the hearts of would be givers: a dog named Pork Chop.

Wolf’s last name is a mystery.

Denver police want to talk to Wolf because of what he may know about a street turf battle that happened only a few blocks from his favored territory near Speer Boulevard and Colfax Avenue.

The battle took place at 5 p.m. — rush hour — prime time for panhandlers.

Traffic gets so congested on Speer and Colfax that it can take commuters three changes of a traffic light to get through an intersection.

While cars are caught in this stop-and-go nightmare, the homeless flash their cardboard signs, making their best pitch for a handout.

Tensions had risen that day between a homeless man named Clint Burtts, a 52-year-old man, and someone else.

When she reported her husband missing on July 30, 1986 to sheriff’s investigators, Stella Ramirez had already noticed changes in her husband’s behavior.

Something had upset Juan Ramirez in the last couple of weeks, she later told the investigators.

He had been spending more time at home with each of his children.

Just a few days earlier, Juan met with his eldest son for lunch and a 3 hour conversation discussing life and his son’s future plans.

Juan also was apologetic to Stella over past mistakes, telling her he wanted nothing but the best for her in the future.

By all accounts, Juan Ramirez was an educated, hard-driving businessman, considered a genius by some with a reputation as a loner
who preferred to work alone.

Meanwhile, across town in Arapahoe County, the same day his wife reported him missing, a rancher traveling in the early morning hours along the frontage road near Airpark and I-70 came upon an unbelievable sight.

Sprawled face-down across the road, in a pool of blood from a single gunshot wound to his head, was the body of Juan Ramirez; fully clothed and still in possession of his wallet, his money and his jewelry.

It became apparent to investigators on scene that Juan’s silence was more important to his executioner than those valuables. Curiously, almost one week
later, Juan’s 1973 Plymouth Fury was discovered by Aurora police in a Village Inn parking lot on East Colfax.

The father of Dylan Redwine says he might be the one a former FBI profiler recently called a ‘person of interest’ in his son’s death but he doesn’t know because authorities have rebuffed his efforts to speak with them.

“I’ve been in communication with the La Plata County Sheriff’s Department and they have no interest in communicating with me right now,” Mark Redwine, the father of deceased 13-year-old Dylan Redwine, said Saturday morning. “I may or may not be that person of interest. Right now there are more questions than answers.”

Sheriff’s investigators also revealed that they conducted other searches on Middle Mountain Road, where Dylan’s body was discovered in the vicinity of his father’s house near Vallecito Reservoir in the summer of 2013 and found “items of interest,” according to the Herald report.

“He’s not made any contact with me,” Redwine said Saturday morning, referring to Klismet. “Everything that is being said is being implied. I think people are reading a lot more into this than is warranted.”

Klismet has not identified the person of interest he is referring to and Redwine said no one has told him who it is. But Redwine said it would be fair to say that authorities have previously indicated that they were primarily focusing their investigation on him.

“Everything that has been said is being implied,” Redwine said.

When first called Saturday morning for comment, Redwine brusquely stated, “At this point I’m not talking,” and hung up the phone.

Brenda Hudak was frightened for the welfare of her two granddaughters including 19-month-old Amanda A’laina Gallegos.

Amanda lived with her baby sister Trinity, father Damian Gallegos and teenage mother Dawn Hudak in the basement of an Adams County home where Brenda Hudak lived on the main floor.

Amanda Gallegos, photo courtesy Colorado Bureau of Investigation

Brenda called the Adams County child abuse hot line over and over. She wasn’t the only one calling.

Rachel Fleischaker, who worked with Brenda Hudak at Quest Diagnostics, said she and two co-workers also called the county’s child abuse line without results. Fleischaker said she once reported seeing that “Amanda had been spanked to the point where she was black and blue all over her thighs.”

The 19-month-old child and her younger sister had been hurt and were in danger.

But when social workers investigated the child’s injuries, Brenda didn’t get a sense that it was a thorough investigation.

In late 2000, Trinity nearly died. A sheriff’s report says Trinity was found “bluish-gray and unresponsive” before a deputy opened her airway.

The infant’s father “said he was walking up the stairs with the baby when he fell down, landing on the child,” Denver Post reporter David Olinger reported at the time.

According to Brenda, the injury temporarily paralyzed the right side of Trinity’s newborn body, but she was recovering in the care of adoptive parents.

The last time Brenda called human services, a caseworker told her that he did see Amanda’s bruises, but that he saw nothing that made him sick to his stomach.

Patricia Beard lived at a home that took care of mentally ill or disabled people.

The 32-year-old woman lived in a one bedroom apartment, number 109, at 555 East 11th Ave.

At 2:50 p.m. on March 27, 1981 someone unlocked her front door to see why she hadn’t left her room. A small portable TV, which was on a stand, was still on at low volume.

Beard was found on her bed. She was lying on her back with her face up. Her right leg was hanging over the side of the bed. Her blue panties and black pants were around her ankle. She was wearing a brown shoe on her right foot.

Her left leg was fully extended on the bed. Her left foot still had a sock on it.

Her pink robe was opened, spread apart. Her slip was pushed up above her genital area.

A large red cut was on the victim’s right jaw near her chin.

Denver’s homicide unit supervisor assigned Pete Diaz to the case the same day as her body was found. He wrote detailed notes about the scene.

Diaz entered the small apartment through a wooden door. The lock on the door was a knob, push-lock device. It was in good working order.

Jimma Reat, far right, with family members, photo taken from U.S. District Court record

Juan Rodriguez took the emergency call in downtown Denver early on the morning of April 1, 2012.

Four men had just had their lives threatened by a large group of Hispanic men in Southwest Denver.

The attackers assaulted Jimma Reat, his two brothers, Ran Pal and Chankuoth Pal, and a close friend, Joseph Kolong, with large beer bottles and “bottle rockets.”

The men had cursed the Sudanese refugees and called the victims the N-word and other ugly racial names.

They managed to elude their attackers and flee to the safety of their apartment complex in Wheat Ridge.

Rodriguez told the men they would get emergency help only if they returned to Denver, turned on the cars’ flashing emergency hazard lights to meet police.

The men obediently drove back to the neighborhood where they had just barely escaped with their lives, but Rodriguez did not send police to meet them.

When the four arrived at the location, the same men who had previously taunted them minutes earlier, opened fire, killing Reat.

“Jimma Reat was gunned down and died in his brother’s arms before the police were even dispatched,” according to a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of Reat’s family against Rodriguez and Denver police by John Holland, Erica Grossman and
Anna Holland Edwards of the Denver law firm of Holland, Holland Edwards & Grossman in September 2012.

Although Rodriguez has been fired, the men who killed Reat have not been arrested for the crime to this day.

“I walked up, rang the doorbell and was greeted by a tattooed woman with a young Rottweiler. She told me to have a seat…

“Sadly, everything I had imagined about a place that brags about selling brick weed was coming true. The tiny, cramped living room was trashed and the bud bar was actually just the pantry of the tiny galley kitchen…”

“Special Kinds had stashed a lot of tinctures and edibles, as well as pot-infused candies, in a cabinet by the refrigerator; the ganja was stored in opaque, plastic cereal containers on a low shelf, with the menu scribbled out on a white board above the shelf. It listed several different kinds of “highs,” including some supposed Skunk 1 and Afghani Kush; two “mids,” which were actually two kinds of seeded brick weed, and one huge brick of dirt-brown shit weed — the “low…”

Walker, who had a criminal record for illegally selling marijuana, had skipped a few steps required to meet state and local requirements for a legal dispensary.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.